It’s the season finale for The Wheel of Time, and it’s full of big confrontations. Whitecloaks vs Seanchan, Egwene vs Renna, Mat vs his own personal demons, and of course, Rand vs Ishamael. Moiraine and Lan get some closure while Nynaeve does not, and all in all, it’s a pretty exciting ride in episode eight, “What Was Meant to Be.”
Recap
The episode opens with a flashback to 3,000 years ago. Lews Therin Telamon (Alexander Karim) tells Ishamael that he has captured all the Forsaken. He will never break the Wheel as Ishamael asks. Ishamael tells Lews to kill him, but instead Lews binds him in the seal.
The Whitecloaks are encamped outside Falme. Geofram Bornhald (Stuart Graham) tells his son why they must fight the Seanchan, despite being heavily outnumbered. Geofram doesn’t believe the prophecies about the Dragon Reborn.
Lanfear takes Rand, along with Moiraine and Lan, through the Ways to the gate to Falme. She casts them through the gate, keeping Rand with her. They travel another way.
Perrin, Aviendha, Bain, and Chiad arrive in Falme. Perrin instructs Hopper to stay safe outside the city.
Lanfear tells Ishamael that she has brought Rand to Falme. Ishamael says it is too soon, that Rand is not yet ready to be convinced to turn to the Dark. Ishamael has the other seals in his room.
The Whitecloaks attack Falme. Renna tells Egwene that a damane who disobeys an order during battle has her tongue cut out, then her hands cut off. When Egwene still shows defiance, Renna cuts off her braid.
Ishamael sends Padan Fain to give Mat the dagger from Shadar Logoth. Mat insists that he will not touch the dagger, but Fain is confident that he will.
Nynaeve uses the a’dam to get information from the captured sul’dam (Jade-Eleena Dregorius). Out on the walls, Rand is sneaking into the city and sees Egwene marching with the other damane.
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Under the Smokestrewn Sky
Walking along the beach where they were flung out of the Waygate, Lan begs Moiraine to restore their bond. He promises that he believes in what Moiraine does, even when he doesn’t understand it. They share a moment, and Moiraine restores their bond.
Perrin and the Aiel make their way through the fighting in the city. They find Loial and the Shienarans, who have recovered the Horn of Valere. They tell Perrin that Egwene is also a captive. Ingtar wants to leave with the Horn, but Loial insists that they stay and fight.
In the tower, the sul’dam and damane prepare for battle. Egwene resists until she sees Valda (Abdul Salis) among the Whitecloaks, who are coming to take the tower and kill the damane. She channels and attacks them.
Turok and some soldiers encounter Rand. Turok sees the heron mark on Rand’s sword and wants to fight him, but Rand kills everyone by channeling.
Ingtar sacrifices himself so that Perrin and the others can escape a group of Senachan soldiers.
Lanfear finds the ship captain, Bayle Domon (Julian Lewis Jones) who brought the poem to Moiraine. She tells him she will pay him to dump some pieces of cuendillar into the ocean.
Suroth tells Ishamael that Turak is dead and the Horn of Valere has been stolen. He sends her to take the reserve damane to a ship and wait for his signal.
Mat uses a pole from the bedpost and uses some torn fabric to turn the Shadar Logoth dagger into a spear without ever touching it, and uses the cursed object to burn through the lock on his door.
Seeing the injured civilians in the street, Egwene refuses to keep fighting. Renna is about to punish Egwene when a trebuchet attack from the Whitecloaks knocks everyone out. In the street, Nynaeve’s captured sul’dam is killed by a crossbow bolt. Elayne takes another one in the thigh. Elsewhere, Mat runs into Perrin.
On the top of the tower, Egwene and Renna are the only ones to have survived. Egwene obtains an a’dam and puts it on Renna. She explains to Renna that the connection that the a’dam makes between sul’dam and damane means that both women must be able to channel. She tells Renna that she will only let her out of the collar if Renna lets her out first, then tortures her. Even though Egwene feels what Renna does and will die if Renna dies, she holds out until Renna releases her. Egwene lets Renna die.
Rand finds Egwene and apologizes for letting her believe that he was dead, and for not coming sooner. They start to leave but Ishamael knocks them both down. Out on the ships, the damane channel, shielding Rand. Ishamael claims that if Rand keeps fighting, he will make them all turn to the Dark, just like he did in his last life.
Perrin tells Mat to take the Horn to Rand, and that they will buy him time. Perrin is attacked by Valda, who almost kills Perrin but is stopped by Hopper. Geofram Bornhald kills Hopper. Perrin kills Geofram and Dain witnesses it.
Facing a huge mass of Seanchan soldiers, Mat blows the Horn of Valere. He suddenly remembers that he is one of the Heroes of the Horn. The other heroes join him, one of whom is Uno. Mat shouts a charge in the Old Tongue. Uno joins Perrin and Loial, offering his shield to Perrin.
Nynaeve is unable to channel, and ends up pushing the arrow out of Elayne’s leg. She doesn’t know if she’ll be able to channel to help Egwene, either.
Rand tells Ishamael that he has never served the Dark One in any of his lives, and never will. Mat attacks Ishamael with the dagger, but he is an illusion, and Rand is struck instead. The real Ishamael is about to attack Rand but Egwene stops him. She creates a wall of air, stopping Ishamael’s attacks.
On the beach, Moiraine sees the Seanchan and suspects that they are shielding Rand. Lan protects her from attacking soldiers as she channels to sink the Seanchan fleet.
Egwene’s wall of air falters, but Perrin arrives in time to block the gap with Uno’s shield. Elayne channels to Heal Rand’s injury. The shield on Rand drops and he channels as he plunges his sword into Ishamael’s chest. The blade burns away, and the heron is branded into Rand’s palm. Ishamael dies.
Moiraine remembers that the Dragon is supposed to be declared over Falme, and channels to make a huge dragon of flame which curls around the tower. Rand and his friends look down on the cheering crowd below.
Lanfear goes to Ishamael’s room to find that all the seals are broken. Moghedien (Laia Costa) tells her that Ishamael let them out because he suspected that Lanfear was going to betray him. Moghedien tells Lanfear that she and Ishamael were always too close to the Dragon, and warns Lanfear to stay away from Rand and his friends. When she is gone, Lanfear whispers for the Light to help Rand.
Analysis
Okay, before I get into the meat of this review, I just need to point out one thing. Nynaeve is supposed to be this great wisdom and healer, so she should definitely know better than to push an entire arrow, including the fletching, through Elayne’s leg. Everyone knows you break it off as close to the skin as possible so you have to only push through a small amount! And you definitely don’t want little bits of feather or whatever is used on the fletching in the wound. After bloodloss, foreign material in the wound is the primary way someone is going to die in that situation.
And she didn’t even put a tourniquet on it! In real life you don’t want to pull something out of a wound (knife, arrow, whatever) because that object is basically acting as a stopper keeping the blood in the body, and if you just yank it out without a plan you’re going to lose so much blood. Granted, this lack of realism is pretty standard for all action movies and shows—most treat life-threatening wounds as temporary inconveniences that disappear as soon as the plot needs to move along—but Elayne makes a point of telling Nynaeve to act like a Wisdom and do what she knows best, so it’s really poor storytelling not to have her, you know, do it well.
I’m sure that Nyenave’s block against channeling is going to be explored in the next season, but I think we could have done with an extra sentence or two here to let us know what’s going on with her. While she was in the Tower the show made it seem like she was choosing not to channel because she feared it, then later it seemed like she was hiding the fact that she can’t channel at will most of the time. She does tell Egwene that “it either comes or it doesn’t,” but a little more explanation would have made what is happening much clearer and more interesting for the audience.
For me, this is another example of the show’s haphazard pacing. It spent arguably too much time on Nynaeve in the first half of the season, and then she suddenly became a character that doesn’t… do anything? I appreciate that there were other characters (especially Mat and Egwene) who were pretty sidelined in the first half of the show and got more to do here, which is good, but it felt really odd as a viewer to have so much of my attention directed into certain things and then abruptly have the pov shift so strongly. If a little more time had been devoted to letting us know what Nynaeve is struggling with internally, it would have helped the transition feel less jarring and strange.
I absolutely loved what Egwene got to do in this episode. I still think that the effects and experiences of being a damane could have been handled better in earlier episodes, but the way this part of her story comes to fruition in episode eight is really powerful. Renna cuts of Egwene’s braid to shame her, but the braid is only a symbol of Egwene’s strength and connection to her people, not the strength itself. The parallel between Egwene’s willingness to enact violence towards Valda and towards Renna was a good one. And from a technical standpoint, it was also a good way to time her eventual confrontation with Renna until it worked for the episode—contrasted, for example, with how many times we returned to Nynaeve sitting with Elayne and still nothing has changed.
Perhaps most moving of all is Egwene’s willingness to feel Renna’s pain, and even potentially to die, in her attempt to free herself of the a’dam. In the end, she proved herself stronger than Renna in every way, and that is even more justice than Renna’s death. Of course, Renna had to die—Egwene promised that she was going to kill her.
I was less impressed with the scene of Nynaeve torturing the sul’dam. Unlike with Egwene, we haven’t spent enough time with how Nynaeve feels about the a’dam to connect with her determination here, and the scene could have used a call back to Nynaeve’s feelings about Ryma’s capture, or perhaps to her feelings about the One Power in general, in order to ground us with her a little more. The line she delivers to the sul’dam about making her curse the first kiss her mother gave her father is actually pulled from the books, and is part of a larger monologue Nynaeve gives to the sul’dam in question that I really loved. But out of context the line doesn’t really have the same impact.
Of course, the episode doesn’t really have extra time to spend on this. But, again, this is a pacing issue. We spent so much time on the visual torture two episodes ago that could have been devoted to explorations of the themes around the a’dam instead, which would have improved the story that this episode is telling, and Nyneave and Elayne’s place in it.
I do think that the way the last two episodes have used flashbacks to set the scene for the themes each episode is exploring has worked very well—so well in fact that I almost wish they had been using the format in every episode. Last week was an exploration of what it means to sacrifice everything for the good of the world, and how to know if you are making the right decisions, how to tell good from evil, and when to allow your friends to help you. In this episode, we turn around themes of fate, and what it means to stand by your friends… or not.
In the flashback, Ishamael and Lews both tell each other that they don’t want to keep doing the same thing over and over. Ishamael believes that the only way to escape the cycle of their reincarnated lives is by breaking the Wheel and destroying everything. Lews decides to not allow Ishamael to be reborn by binding him into the cuendillar seal. Later, during their confrontation, Ishamael prepares to kill Rand in hope of being able to turn him to the Dark in Rand’s next lifetime. Rand counters by telling Ishamael that he is certain that he has never, not in a single lifetime, served the Dark. And that he never will.
In both instances, separated by 3,000 years, these two people are facing the idea of fate, of inevitability, and coming up with almost the same conclusion—that who they are is immutable and unchangeable, across all their lifetimes. Rand finds strength in this, while Ishamael finds despair, but what is interesting is that Ishamael is still trying to change Lews/Rand—he sees his own alignment as inevitable but not Rand’s, somehow. He sees the fate of Rand’s current friends as inevitable too—yes, convincing Rand that they will turn to the Dark is a ploy to manipulate Rand, but I think we can assume that Ishamael also truly believes what he is saying. He isn’t the kind of villain who makes up lies to get what he wants; he believes the truth supports what he wants, and only needs to push events and people in the right direction to make them see it, too.
But if Ishamael truly believes that every fate is fixed, how can he also believe that he can eventually convince Lews, or Rand, or some future incarnation of the Dragon, to side with him? And if he actually believes that the Dragon’s choices aren’t fixed, then who is to say that his own fate can’t change?
The answer, most likely, lies in what Siuan said to Rand in episode seven. The Dragon is not caught in the Pattern the way other people are—the Dragon is the water that drives, or breaks, the Wheel itself. This offers a very good explanation for the jealousy that is inherent in Ishamael’s friendship with, and hatred of, Lews/Rand. Not only is the Dragon the only one who can accomplish the breaking of the Wheel that Ishamael dreams of… they are also the only person who appears to exist outside of predestination.
That is, according to Ishamael’s philosophy. Not everyone in this world believes that being reborn means suffering the same fate as you did in previous lives. Tam, for example, told Rand that this is the comfort of the cycle of the Wheel—that you will always be reborn and given the chance to do better. And I wish the show had spent a little more time with Mat, because I think his journey this season is actually meant to be about this question.
We don’t know what the real deal is with the tea that Ishamael gave him. It’s possible that Ishamael lied to Mat about what it does, and then gave Mat specific visions, either via the tea or via other means, to make him believe he was a bad person in every life. It’s also possible that Ishamael believes the tea shows you all your lives but is incorrect about the details—maybe the tea only shows you the lives you fear, or maybe your intention shapes your results, or a thousand other options. Without any of this information, however, the viewer is left to guess, and I think the lack of clarity is hampering the message again.
Then, when Mat blows the Horn of Valere he suddenly remembers that he is one of the Heroes of the Horn. This is confirmed by another one of the Heroes, who tells Mat that they have fought side by side many times. So we are left to wonder if the other visions Mat saw of his life were untrue, or if both the heroic lives and the bad ones were true. How much choice exists from life to life? Has Mat made the right choices sometimes, and fallen other times? And if so, what circumstances existed in each scenario to bring him in one direction or another?
Ishamael tells Rand that he made Egwene a killer by abandoning her, but that isn’t true. While Rand’s decision to fake his death did affect the trajectory of Egwene’s life, he is not responsible for her choices. It is, after all, Ishamael himself who arranged to have Egwene taken by the Seanchan—but more than that, Egwene’s choices are still her own, despite other people’s meddling in her circumstances. Ishamael is attempting to deny her agency as a person very much in the way that Renna and the a’dam tried to do. But Egwene is still herself, and her options being limited does not change the fact that she made her own choices. She chose to defy Renna, even knowing that Rennna might cut out her tongue or cut off her hands. She chose to let Renna die, even after Renna had freed her from the collar. The fact that Egwene’s choices were shaped by her captivity doesn’t mean that someone else made her who she is.
Mat also makes choices. Last season he abandoned his friends to the Ways and chose to go back to look for the Shadar Logoth dagger. But this time, even confronted with the dagger again and locked up with it, he still made the choice not to touch it. He relied on his ingenuity and allowed himself to believe in his ability to escape, and that choice not only led to him discovering his identity as a Hero of the Horn, but also was instrumental in the fate of his friends, and of Rand.—in both good and bad ways, as it turns out.
I am so excited to see where his story goes in the next season. Making Mat a Hero of the Horn is an alteration from the books, but it is very much in keeping with the type of character Mat is. This choice is a very good way to streamline Mat’s story and still achieve relatively the same character beats and development, and I couldn’t he happier with the change.
The mechanics of the dagger make no sense, though. It turns some people to ash, and it burns through metal, but when Rand is stabbed he stays alive for quite a bit, and although the Healing looks strange and incomplete, Elayne is able to save him despite being only a novice who’s been in the White Tower no more than… a few months? I’m not sure of the exact timeline, but it’s not long. This irked me almost as much as pushing the arrow through Elayne’s leg, almost as much as the fact that the show took eight episodes to actually remind the audience clearly and straightforwardly what the Horn of Valere is for.
I do, however, love that they made Uno a hero of the Horn. He doesn’t die in the books, and I was a little miffed at his fate in episode six. I take that back now—and I also think this is a point in favor of the suggestion that one’s lives are not always the same. Uno didn’t do anything wrong in this life, by he didn’t really get much of a chance to be heroic, either. And it’s nice to think that you’re always a hero of the Horn, even if some of your lives are less impressive than others, or if you get captured and killed early.
Ingtar’s death was less effective, for me. In the books he has a whole storyline which makes his choice to sacrifice himself a very important thematic moment, very much like Boromir’s death in The Lord of the Rings. It makes sense that the show didn’t use the storyline, but it was a bit clumsy the way it tried to set Ingtar’s sacrifice up at the last possible moment by giving Loial the speech about being the heroes of future legends. I did really like the speech, however; it was reminiscent of Sam’s speech at the end of The Two Towers film in a rather lovely way. Loial’s character hasn’t gotten much development in the show, but we know that he is a lover of books and stories and history, so this moment from him was very fitting.
Another change from the books is Rand’s confrontation with Turak. As I mentioned in last week’s review, Rand spends the beginning of The Great Hunt being trained by Lan in swordsmanship. When he faces Turak in the book he is able to defeat Turak in single combat and does not use the One Power. I had been wondering how this would be handled in the show, since Rand is not that skilled with his sword, and I thought the choice was very effective. As in the show, Turak’s slaves killed themselves when he died out of loyalty to their master.
I was very intrigued with the way the show positioned Geofram Bornhald. Last season he seemed like a pretty good guy, someone who didn’t agree with Valda’s extreme views, a Whitecloak who still advised Moiraine to see an Aes Sedai healer. Now in this episode we meet him again, a man who is willing to go fight for Falme when it seems like no one else cares, even though his forces are vastly outnumbered. He tells Dain that the Seanchan are slavers and murderers, and that the Whitecloaks will fight them because they must… and that all sounds pretty good.
But we also get a glimpse of another side of him, a man who refers to the Aes Sedai as witches and believes the prophecy of the Dragon to be lies they made up, a man who still keeps Valda by his side despite the horrors Valda has committed. And then there is the brutal way he kills Hopper. Now of course, if you saw a wild animal mauling someone you’d probably try to beat it off or kill it, too, but the scene is deliberately framed in a way that makes Bornhald’s actions seem cold and cruel. There is no shock or panic in his expression when he sees that Valda is being attacked, he almost looked bored. It’s like, oh, there’s that annoying coworker of mine getting mauled by wolves again, guess I have to do something about it. And the way he strides off afterwards makes it feel more like he just squashed a bug then that he was dealing with a unexpected wolf attack.
And then we have another thematic cycle as Perrin picks up an axe again, for the first time since the first episode, this time to avenge someone he loved. But Dain witnessing the death of his father, especially without even having the context of Valda’s attack and Hopper’s death, is no doubt going to have long term repercussions for Perrin. Just as Ila suggested to Perin in season one, picking up that weapon isn’t going to bring anything good into Perrin’s life.
And finally, we come to Lan and Moiraine. The quiet moments between them in season one, especially the first episode, were the first thing that I loved about the series. And the quiet moments, between Moiraine and Lan, or Moiraine and Siuan, or between various permutations of the Three Rivers kids, have always been where The Wheel of Time show has shone the brightest. I’m thinking of Moiraine teaching Egwene to channel for the first time, of Moiraine sneaking away to meet with Siuan, of Lan and Nynaeve’s conversations, of Perrin and Rand helping Mat out and buying him Beltine lanterns to give to his sisters, of Egwene and Perrin traveling with the Tuatha’an. All these moments are the heart of the series, and while the action and plotting can be confusingly executed, where the pacing of the series is hit or miss, the quiet moments continue to shine.
I was waiting all season to have this Moiraine and Lan back, just as the characters themselves have also been waiting. The conversation between them about their relationship and their respect for one another was perfect, and the restoration of the bond brought me almost to tears. There is something so beautiful about the connection between the two of them, one that is not sexual the way Alanna’s is with her Warders but which is so deeply loving, in a manner that transcends most other kinds of relationships. For the last several episodes we have been treated to Renna’s deeply disturbing idea of what it means to be connected to someone else through the One Power, but now we see what true connection between people really looks like. Not romantic in the sense of them being in love, but in the sense of being larger than life, heroic like the Heroes of the Horn are heroic, as strong and inexorable as the One Power. Though great in many other respects, the source material for this story is deeply, deeply heteronormative and very devoted to the idea that men and women are different and unknowable to each other, and that makes this connection the show has given us between Moiraine and Lan all the more special.
As the series ends, we’re left with a lot of questions about the future. What enemies will fill the void left by Ishamael? The Forsaken, surely, but Padan Fain is still out there, and Valda, and now Dain Bornhald as well. Liandrin, and plenty of other Darkfriends, too. What happened to Siuan? Will Nynaeve ever learn to channel at will? Will Rand’s injury fully heal?
And what does it mean for Lanfear to ask for something from the Light?
The Wheel of Time has already been greenlit for a third season, so all we have to do now is wait and see. Meanwhile, Rand has been officially proclaimed as the Dragon Reborn. As the books always say, its not the beginning, but it is a beginning.
Easter Eggs and Fun Facts
- I enjoy how much Artur Hawkwing’s armor looks like Gondor armor from The Lord of the Rings, and that he also a Rohirrim-looking guy beside him.
- The Whitecloak children bringing the smoke to hide the attacking soldiers was a nice touch, with the way it evoked altar boys bringing incense during Catholic services.
- When Ishamael tells Padan Fain that Lanfear has betrayed them, Fain counters with “But she is sworn to him.” Ishamael replies that there are many paths to walk through the night. “Him” in this context is the Dark One, and this conversation recalls the one that Lanfear had with Liandrin. Loyalty to the Dark One is not the same as loyalty to one of his followers, and as Moiraine tells us, the Forsaken often fight among themselves. This conversation also speaks to Ishamael’s fatalistic approach to life—he knew who Lanfear was and what she would do—they both did—and yet he released her anyway. Because he needed her, she says, and because she completes him. But also, perhaps, because Ishamael is one of those villains who is always the agent of his own destruction.
- The prophecy about the Dragon being proclaimed in Falme that is quoted by Moiraine and by Dain Bornhald has been altered slightly from the books. In the Karaethon Cycle, aka the Prophecies of the Dragon, the line runs “Above the Watchers Over the Waves shall he proclaim himself, bannered ‘cross the sky in fire.” This is changed to “Above the watchers shall the Dragon be proclaimed, bannered across the sky in fire,” since in the show it is Moiraine who puts up the image to show that Rand is the Dragon Reborn. In the books, Rand is actually seen fighting Ishamael in the sky.
Favorite Quote: “The only reason that I was able to say that you’re not my equal is that I’ve known one thing to be true since the first day we met. You have always been my better.”
Runner Up: “Kill me. And you and I can dance this dance again in our next lives.”
Sylas K Barrett really enjoys the philosophical elements of The Wheel of Time, and how the show plays with the books’ arcs and themes.
